Ireland has admitted some responsibility for workhouses run by Catholic nuns that once kept thousands of women and teenage girls against their will in unpaid, forced labor.

The apology comes after an expert panel found that Ireland should be legally responsible for the defunct Magdalene Laundries because authorities committed about one-quarter of the 10,012 women to the workhouses from 1922 to 1996, often in response to school truancy or homelessness.

“To those residents who went through the Magdalene Laundries in a variety of ways, 26 percent of the time from state involvement, I am sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment,” said Prime Minister Enda Kenny on behalf of the Irish government, according to Reuters.

We are to believe that god’s justice will ignite in response to sincere, genuine love if it’s not love approved by god – you can’t love a nonbeliever or someone of the same gender. Love, caring, is punishable in god’s eyes, according to the Catholic Church – and we’re warned not to provoke god.

However, if god cannot be provoked to save these women from the cross-wearing monsters who assumed the authority to imprison them as a work force for the Catholic Church, then god is as emotionally inert as the cosmos. We should be grateful that such a god does not exist, and furious we have given power to any human being, especially those bereft of compassion, because they claim to be working in his name.